Nota Bene, Mea Culpa

Because if you can't say it in Latin, why bother to say it at all? Anyway, I messed up; I said the humans in my book used Bose-Einstein condensate shielding to protect against the radiation when they're going up on the orbit elevator (fortunately it hasn't directly come up in the book itself). But actually, the radiation encountered entering LEO is ionizing radiation. Which is easier to deal with!

See, all you need to make ionizing radiation go away is a magnetic shield, which we've known how to do for so long, Werner von Braun wrote articles about it. Apparently the way you do it on ships is you line them with toroidal magnet rings. Surely you could just stick a ring of magnets around the elevator-car on the orbit elevator.

Which is interesting, also: I can line my ships with rings of magnets. Anything that makes the ship look cooler, huh?

On the Passing Scene II

Hey, since the random musings idea was invented by Thomas Sowell, why not name them after his description of them? And yeah, I had more. You can keep your remarks about why I have so many random thoughts to yourself.

• Speaking of Sowell, he's a very thoughtful writer, much moreso than Walter Williams or Larry Elder or most of the other prominent black conservative writers. He's also more thoughtful than Mike Adams or George Will, or most of the other more libertarian-leaning writers. So I'm certainly annoyed when commenters on his articles, wherever you happen to find them, call him an "Uncle Tom"—because, apparently, the only path to authentic blackness is lockstep leftism.
  
  That said, I see their temptation: a black guy who criticizes not only the party blacks (all too) often identify with, but many trends within black America itself, and his name is Thomas. That kind of opportunity for vitriolic wordplay doesn't come along every day.


• "Vitriol" reminds me of all that talk of late, about "vitriolic rhetoric". Leaving to one side the inapplicability to the incident in question, or who exactly has been dishing out such words, I confess to having a thought I haven't seen elsewhere. Namely, the only "vitriolic" rhetoric I've seen, in recent political times, has been from Democrats: specifically that their economic policy would need the Philosopher's Stone to be solvent.
  
  That's an alchemy joke, of course. VITRIOLUM (Visita Interiora Terrae, Rectificando, Inveniens Occultum Lapidem, Veram Medicinam) is the mnemomic for the Stone: seek within the earth, purifying, finding the hidden stone, the true medicine.
  
  Pfft. You thought you were a nerd?


• So I discovered I can shorten my bull-pup AR rifle even more, by removing the M4 barrel beyond the front sight. At that point the barrel length is 67.8 cm, or shorter than the M4 Close Quarters Battle Receiver (with stock extended). But, being bullpup, the barrel is also 67.8 cm long, which is longer than many sniper rifle barrels.
  
  I also found out there's a thing called the M110 Semi-Auto Sniper System, which is an AR chambered in 7.62 NATO (as was the original AR10). The 7.62 is a lot stronger than 5.56, which'll be important against body armor in the future, but often too strong in terms of recoil, especially on full auto. But there are systems, like the "blowback shifted pulse" used on the Russian AN-94, for getting around recoil.


• So I consider it my patriotic duty to like Eugene Stoner more than Mikhail Kalashnikov. I mean, the one real advantage of Kalashnikovs is, you don't have to take good care of them and they're simple to operate. So they're perfect for the Communist conception of the average person, a proletarian chump who's either a disposable drone for the Revolution, or a class-traitor fighting against it due to false consciousness. The AR family (at least now we've ground the kinks out), on the other hand, are a little more high-maintenance and complex, but they're also almost always more accurate. In other words, they require a modicum of discipline and intelligence, and reward them with a greater precision in working the user's will: plainly, they're the weapon of the 18th Century republicanism that founded America.
  
  Also, Stoner never claimed to have designed his assault rifle "from a blank sheet of paper", as if nobody had ever seen a Stürmgewehr 44.


• So a guy (oh yeah, it was Greg Gutfeld) was saying how a lot of people seem to think anyone who owns a gun is a gun nut. I can vouch that that is not the case: I've seen many a gun owner's eyes glass over when I start geeking out about guns. Okay, two.
  
  But it's interesting because, being the colossal gun geek that I am, I don't actually own one.


• Has anyone noticed, speaking of Gutfeld, that Robert Downey Jr, at least when he plays Tony Stark (and at the Golden Globes), sounds almost exactly like Andy Levy, on Red Eye?


• Here's a party game to play with right-wingers: ask them which rewards personal achievement more, the US or the Soviet Union.
  
  Then ask them who invented the M1911. Or the AR-series. Unless they're gun nuts, they won't know the answer (John Browning and Eugene Stoner, respectively)—but they're a lot more likely to have heard of Mikhail Kalashnikov and Nikolay Makarov.
  
  It doesn't really show anything, but it sure is fun to piss libertarians off.


• Another fun example of that idea, is to point out the utter refutation of environmental determinism. Namely, Holland and Switzerland. Both Calvinist nations that gained independence from the Holy Roman Empire, were largely commercial, and are currently mostly associated with assisted suicide and libertarian attitudes toward guns and/or drugs—and look at their environments.
  
  Quod erat demonstrandum, lupa.


• So apparently it's not widely known that spec-ops don't use silencers for stealth (because they're not great for that), they use them for their own hearing. Because guns are a lot louder indoors; outside, they're actually not all that loud unless you're near them.


• Shifting gears without a clutch, did you know apparently an owl's ear-holes are higher on one side than the other? Yeah, it's for directional hearing, 'cause they don't have outer ears they can turn to locate sounds.


• Finally, so apparently Hu Jintao (whose surname Bill O'Reilly can't pronounce to save his life) said something silly about the dollar's dominance ending, and the yuan (or rather, the renminti) getting stronger.
  
  And I was watching this economist, saying, "Yeah, he wouldn't want that to happen. His country's so geared toward exporting to us, they really want the dollar as strong as it could possibly be, so we'll buy more."
  
  Apparently Hu Jintao never saw that one episode of Cromartie High where Mechazawa explains that idea to that guy who's depressed about the yen being weak.

Yeah Yeah Something Random Blah Blah

So I don't care enough to come up with a clever name for a random thoughts post.

• I realized, the barrel length on the M4-based bullpup AR I mentioned in my last post? Yeah, it's 75.6 cm...which is just under 30 inches, or longer than the barrel on the M82 sniper rifle chambered in .50 BMG. Apparently, every Marine will be a sniper at some time in the future.


• So what's with Halsey in Reach, saying the conical bullet was a military game-changer in the 19th century, on par with the slipstream drive in the 23rd? Because, see, there's several problems: the conical bullet wasn't much of a game-changer, and it wasn't widely adopted till the early 20th century (the French won World War I, with a little English and American help, using round-tipped 8 mm Lebel in their Lebel 1886 rifles). More to the point, the big game-changers of the 19th century were cartridge ammo, allowing much faster loading, and smokeless powder, making it easier to see the battlefield. Compared to those two, Spitzer rounds are a footnote.


• So my brother and I have started playing Reach's Firefight mode, and, um, whichever player wants to be the blue team, plays as an Elite. On the same side as the AI Covenant opponents. You gotta try this, it's awesome. Only problem is, the Grunts are so gosh-darn cute, fighting on the same side as them makes you feel a little bad about using them as cannon fodder.
  
  I recommend taking turns being Blue Team, though, 'cause it's really hard to win as the Reds under those conditions.


• So what's with Japanese English and saying "Let's (Noun)"? It's just bizarre, is what it is.
  
  My only theory is, "Let's party"—and nobody explained that "party" can be a verb. The 70s and 80s have carved a charred swath through a number of languages; I suspect this is one of the casualties.


• So apparently some bacteria substitute selenium for sulfur in some biochemicals. Which is interesting—what if there were a life-form that did it all the time? Admittedly I don't know how likely that is, selenium being a whole row lower, but their planet could be odd.
  
  Of course, if selenium stands in for sulfur, routinely, well...you think rotten eggs smell bad? Apparently selenium smells worse in compounds like that.


• So I decided to take out orbit catapults, other than for cargo, in my SF book; the only way humans would survive that would be by using the artificial gravity-based inertia protectors, and I decided the artificial gravity doesn't work very well on planets. It needs to use the Casimir effect to induce exoticity in a plasma shell, after all, and I'm not sure you'd wanna do that in an atmosphere.
  
  Most human planets use orbit elevators; their ships are insulated with Bose-Einstein condensates, so radiation's not a problem. On one, though—a planet orbiting Tau Ceti, which is apparently a messy system—they do orbit insertion with reusable rocket-stages (TSTO, specifically), because the debris impacts would make short work of an elevator. Another, with a 5-bar pressure atmosphere of carbon monoxide and methane, and seas of formaldehyde (it's cold there), uses zeppelins to bring ships high up into the atmosphere, where they take off.
  
  The aliens can use orbit catapults, thanks to how their guns work, but they usually take off with their magnetosphere sails.


• My humans use two different landers, as well: a shuttle-type, that lands like an airplane, and the detachable habitat-section of a fusion rocket-ship, which lands something like the McDonnell-Douglas Delta Clipper idea. Both types, though, use orbit elevators, rocket stages, or zeppelins to take off (they're reusable TSTOs, in other words).
  
  And yeah, once they're in LEO, they rendezvous with the ship that had their main rocket. I'm not sure the second one would necessarily be a good idea (though I do like the image of a ship's habitat section doubling as a lander); it's just a cheap and easy way for me, as the writer, not to have to multiply settings. Actually it's because I initially wrote those scenes with the whole ships themselves landing, and didn't want to have to re-set them at a hotel or something. I mean, all those scenes were taking place in the ship's hab-section anyway.

But Col. Colt Made Them Equal

Yes, yes, it is time for further ruminations upon the great equalizer (no, not death).

• It would be difficult to find a more steampunk firearm than the French MAS 1873 Chamelot-Delvigne, at least without replacing the powder load of each cartridge with a water tank (which will, of course, be instantaneously brought to boiling...somehow). Seriously, it looks like a Webley as souped up by a mad scientist. Brass-plate it and engrave a trilobite on there, seriously, what do you think Jaegermonsters use as a sidearm?


• Difficult, but not impossible: I give you the Steyr-Mannlicher M1894, a very early semi-auto pistol. It's more steampunk simply by virtue of being something we think of as modern, done a very 19th-century way. It's a pistol with a box magazine, but that magazine is not detachable; rather, it loads from the top, like a Mauser pistol. But look at the shape of it: since the frame is shaped like that of a contemporary European revolver (much more Webley than Colt, just look at it), it can't be loaded with a clip, only round-by-round. Yes it's weird but it's also awesome.
  
  Late Addendum: Turns out it can be loaded with a stripper clip. Weird. The thing's shape must be really odd.


• From the early steampunk graspings to the highest modern tech, I realized, if you wanted a bullpup AR variant, you'd just take the basic shape of the M4 carbine and stick the magazine in the very end of the stock. Its overall length, being as long as the M4 with stock retracted, is only 1.3 cm longer than the wz. 2005 Jantar (the bullpup Kalashnikov Poland experimented with), but its barrel, running the same length as the gun itself, is not only 29.9 cm longer than that of the Jantar, it's even 24.8 longer than that of the M16A4. No more of those "barrel too short to properly stabilize the round" complaints.
  
  And you know what? Ship the thing with a derned ejector conversion kit, for southpaws, the way FAMAS does. Or just man up and make the switch to caseless.


• I must confess I find the M4 intriguing. Not as a battle weapon—I'd opt to use the full-length M16, thank you, if remotely possible. But I'm fascinated by the fact the Marine Corps is so committed to the idea that "every Marine is a rifleman" that their officers carry M4s as sidearms, rather than pistols (which may just be because a lot of Marines appear not to like their Beretta M9s—consider that Force Recon's sidearm is an M1911 variant). I'd say it's open to debate whether a carbine qualifies as a "sidearm", but that would mean debating Marines, and I've done that, so they can call it whatever they want.


• So, due to how their weapons function, my felinoid aliens use round bullets, dimpled for stability like golf balls. And, because the bullets are round, they use tubular magazines in their long guns, which basically look like Henry rifles or Winchester '73s (they prefer the extra reach, when using their guns as melee weapons). But their tubular magazines are detachable—each of their soldiers carries a "quiver" with a couple of 'em. Of course, they also have guys using SAWs, but their SAW is just the standard rifle on full-auto, with a helical magazine instead of a tubular one, giving it six times the ammo.
  
  Their handguns basically look like certain 19th-century revolvers, like the Webley Mk. II or the S&W No. 3 "Schofield", but instead of being revolvers, they have a helical magazine about the size of a revolver's cylinder, with three twists' worth of ammo (probably 15-18 rounds, in a handgun no less!). It's actually a conscious design choice on my part, that their weapons look sort of old-fashioned by human standards...until you notice their muzzle flash is glowing plasma, accompanied by a slight ripple of space-time distortion.


• So apparently the main trouble with magnetically-accelerated guns, whether rail or coil, is wear and charge buildup in the barrels. I'm not certain it would work, but...why not rotate between several barrels?
  
  Yes, that's right, an actual reason to have a rotary, Gatling-style electromagnetic gun. Don't say I never gave you anything.

Glossopoeia

Because that's what Tolkien called it; none of your vulgar "conlang" here, thank you. No not really but "glossopoeia" has a nice ring, huh?

This shall be random but I don't think I'm gonna use bulleted lists.

So, does anybody do the ol' Babel Text thing? Genesis 11:1-9, you know, as a demonstration of your languages? I prefer it as a sample text to the UN's "Universal Declaration of Human Rights", the sample text Omniglot usually uses; I just think that thing's depressing, since they all immediately set out to try and make Maritain a liar. Us Thomists be tight; it's representin', you feel me? Sorry, I just spent like three hours reading Penny Arcade newsposts, and I think Tycho's habit of randomly becoming gangsta is contagious.

The Babel Text proponents are right, though, Babel is a better representation of a language than the Lord's Prayer (another standby sample), since the Lord's Prayer is in the sorta stilted diction common to prayers. I really doubt the Amatsu Norito is a representative sample of Classical Japanese, you know?

Ahem. Anyway, so I'm actually getting pretty good at conlangs. I've got two whole language families, one for my fantasy book and the other for my SF one—though the former is really an elaborate cipher for Latin and the Romance languages, and for Old Norse and German. Still, if you're going to have a quasi-Medieval setting, why not? I've got two other alien languages actually worked out, in my SF book, as well as three or more others I mention but don't actually have detailed. I've also got an elvish language for a D&D setting I'm thinking of using, with the phonics of Hungarian and the grammar of Tibetan.

For alien languages, I like to use sounds not found in any human language, and take out some that are. For instance the felinoids in my book can't pronounce F or V, since their lips and jaws aren't mobile enough; their own languages lack those sounds and they pronounce them in human languages like IPA ɸ and β, the bilabial fricatives (which is how phi and beta are pronounced in Modern Greek, by the bye). They also have a pair of vowels, one rounded and the other not, that are pronounced with a low trill that sounds like purring (the apparatus is different though, sorta like a sideways bird syrinx—one vocal apparatus does normal voicing, the other only trills). I also decided to change the number of their teeth, to 25—they make the same shape inside the mouth as cat teeth, but the divisions are different; they have more molars and premolars and fewer incisors.

The evangelical Heideggerian aliens don't actually have vocal cords; they resonate their whole respiratory systems, like baleen whales, to produce "voicing", and also hiss on some vowels.

Another species, I don't know if I mentioned them, sort of feathered dromaeosaurs whose civilization bases status on conspicuous consumption and potlatch-esque intellectual property, and conceptualizes its economy as working by gift even where it doesn't, has a weird vocal apparatus I'm not entirely sure of (maybe something like bullfrogs, only maybe internal?). The major language they use (I mention they've got others, since this ain't Star Trek) also has tonal vowels, and sometimes uses "ww", a hollow hiss, as a vowel sound. Their consonants are what's really weird; they have two different click consonants that have no IPA letter. One is a lateral/postalveolar ingressive click, produced by sucking on the molars while separating them. The other is an alveolar egressive click, produced by slamming the tip of the tongue into the spot for "t", forcing the air out with a "hwut" sound. Of course technically they don't have teeth—instead they have hardened beak-like sections, inside their lips, that make a shape similar to a dog's teeth.

Grammar is full of possibilities, though in general, as I said before, it's not likely to be all that different from most human languages. The felinoids' major language, for instance, is head-final and agglutinating, and uses postpositions—all of which are extremely common on earth. It has two classes of nouns and verbs, depending on whether the first syllable has a "purred" vowel or a normal one. It marks noun case and verb tense with prefixes, and noun number and verb aspect with suffixes. It uses different cases for active and passive subjects, and passivizes verbs by switching them to the other verb-class's affixes. One peculiar feature is that nouns and verbs have a different sound structure from adjectives, pospositions, and adverbs; the former alternate syllables between purred and not, or vice-versa, while the latter are either all purred or all normal. Adjectives can't be used "intransitively"; you can't say "he's stupid", you have to say "he's a stupid person". Adjectives and adverbs go after the words they modify, and verbs can also have prefixes for a number of moods like imperative or negative (there's also a negator adverb for adjectives, basically like "un-").

The Heideggerian aliens use (I think, it's been awhile since I wrote any dialog in their language) a head-medial isolating language, like Chinese; I'm pretty sure it uses post-positions and has its adjectives after their nouns. I don't think it uses reduplication to make plurals (Chinese does), but it might use reduplication as an intensifier on adjectives. I don't think it's come up.

Yes I'm a nerd.

Just to Fill Space

So I just thought I'd give myself an even 108 for the year. So, um...Random Thoughts!

• Dr. Rurru, an obscure little manga I don't think is available over here, is oddly similar to World God Only Knows. Except Rurru's spazziness makes Elsie look like the chick from Medaka Box.
  
  One gag I wish had been carried over from the oneshot pilot is the part where Rurru doesn't want to activate the escape pod, because its two switches (to keep it from being activated accidentally?) sorta look like nipples, and she's embarrassed to touch them. It's more or less everything you've got to know about her character right there.


• So remember the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man"? Aside from the fact the alien is Eegah (Shtimlo!), the story's basic premise is sound, but the execution is flawed.
  
  First, "their alphabet has capital and small letters", though obviously quite possible (lots of people develop a cursive form, and it's far from rare to have some mix of cursive and non-cursive—e.g., hiragana come from cursive kanji), is a lame reason to have trouble translating it. How about, "it's a system of logograms with some 4000 basic characters?"
  
  Second, I don't really think many other languages have "serve" as an idiom actually meaning "present as a meal."


• Much better is the thing from the backstory of Halo, about the Covenant mistranslating "reclaimer" as "reclamation". Apparently Forerunner is like Semitic languages, and uses its active participle as an agentive form.
  
  Speaking of, the Arabic word for "poet", sha'ir (itself an active participle), was also the name for the pre-Islamic tribal medicine men—that's why the Arabian Nights-themed D&D setting uses it as the name for those mages who contract with genies. What's weird about it, though is, hataałi, the Navajo word for medicine man, means "singer". Or, I think, "he sings"—the Navajo agentive is usually a terpsimbrotos.


• Speaking of terpsimbrotoi (assuming that's the plural), isn't the French word for "dishwasher" one? "Lave-vaisselle" means "washes dishes", so...huh, apparently French sometimes uses a terpsimbrotos-agentive too. You know, when it doesn't use "-eur".


• Ah, crap, now that I've re-written my story to have fusion rockets, I gotta rewrite something. I was gonna have a "colony drop" variant (I don't regard it as SF without a Colony Drop, I'm a Gundam fan), except fusing all a ship's antimatter at once...but apparently fusion engines are too damned stable, and simply stop fusing when they're damaged.
  
  Huh, maybe just do it old school? Anything going at 3000 m/s packs its own weight in blam, and the cruising speed of military ships (which have the really big, scary fusion rockets) is .1 c, which is 10,000 times that...something going at that speed, that weighs nearly 8,000 tons, has a kinetic energy of approximately 820,000 megatons, or 1608 times all the nuclear testing of the 20th Century. Yeah, that oughta do it. Bwahahah.

Roketto de kidou shuuseishite kudasaru?

Which is, of course, "kindly perform orbital corrections with a rocket." Because ALI PROJECT are awesome, that's why (though, I ask you, why couldn't they have worked their trademark coquettish gothery into a spacey song?). That's a line from the opening to Sora wo Kakeru Shojo; technically it's "nee, anata no roketto", which makes it "say, with your rocket, can you correct (my) orbit?"

Anyway, this here's a collection of my recent thoughts upon rocketry and aviation and, y' know, SPACE.

• Went to the Pima Air and Space Museum. Saw some historically significant, but boring, WWII planes. And, more importantly, a UH-1 Huey and a AH-1 Cobra and the A-10 Thunderbolt ("God's own anti-son of a bitch machine"), and a couple of those giant cargo planes that can carry an M1 Abrams tank. And, well, let's just say that place is sodding Disneyland for rocket nerds, because not only have they got a Blackbird (yeah, Sierra Romeo Seven One, sonny boy, there ain't another), they've also got, get this get this get this, a Vomit Comet. I trust you don't need that explained? Yeah, and the Super Guppy, which is used for flying Saturn V rockets around. And looking like a cartoon whale.


• But alas, the space display there is somewhat...depressing. Why? Well, couple reasons. First is the display of shelved ideas for Shuttle replacements, Single-stage to Orbit reusable launch vehicles, and, well, of all the words of tongue or pen, the second worst are "it might have been."


• Still worse are those we often see, "it is, but it hadn't ought to be." As, for instance, nary a word in the displays there about nuclear rockets. And let's face it, ain't no other game in town, kids. You wanna get out of this hole we're in, you gonna need somethin' a little richer 'n combustion. NTR's the bare minimum; me, I'm thinking fusion. H->He, if you can get it; 3He-2H or even mere 3H-2H, if you can't.


• 'Nother thing that hadn't ought to be: so there's apparently this treaty that says space resources can't be claimed in situ, but can be owned once they're mined or refined or whatever. Which, um, hey, that's real cute and all, but why are you deliberately shooting asteroid mining in the foot? Where I come from we got a name for what that treaty legalizes, and that name is claim jumping. Gawd.


• And yet those selfsame schmucks turn around (after cheerfully strangling space industry in its cradle from some weird hatred of private property) and go on and on and on about "privatizing space". Did it occur to anyone else that the kind of things you need to get anywhere in space are precisely the kinds of things no sane person wants in private hands? I'm sorry, I think most of the agitation about corporations being too powerful is poppycock, and Marxist poppycock at that, but I, for one, do not want Boeing to have the bomb. Kzinti lesson? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Speaker-to-Animals?
  
  The other problem I have with it—"space tourism"—is, it's the Scrooge McDuck approach to cultural conflict. Because obviously the best way to preserve and husband any resource is to turn it into a tourist trap!


• Got GURPS Basic and GURPS Space. Um...wow. This system took me a day to learn. Damn, that's impressive, that's the Mac of RPGs (except universally compatible—zing!). But (and I know this is weird), something in the Space book was the final straw, and so I took the pion/beam-core antimatter rockets out of my book, and replaced them with an unspecified type of H->He fusion ship. I'd recently changed a few descriptions so now all the ships have the "tower" floorplan (because a spaceship ain't a plane or a boat), though I still have artificial gravity because 1 g of acceleration is too damn slow. I even changed the felinoids' ships to have that floorplan, and they have a reactionless engine...though, then again, they always visualized spaceships as fortifications, not boats.
  
  Whoo. Yeah, actually it didn't take that much rewriting to change the ships from pion to helium fusion rockets. Actually, though, they only use the H->He rockets on starships, to get to the edge of systems so they can use the FTL as quickly as possible; in-system ships use conventional 3He-2H or 3H-2H fusion, and go a lot slower. And for landing? Yep, they use either little shuttle-type ships, or have detachable habitat sections. Because no sane person lands a fusion rocket (I've always wondered why Niven has people do that).


• Then again, Heinlein and Niven and all the other people who just transplant "rugged frontier individualism" wholesale into space, yo, got a point, gents. Two, actually. A) It never really happened in the first place, sorry, I live there. And B) how the hell do fiercely-independent Belters, or whatever horse-hockey colonists Heinlein has, manage to hang on to their rugged individualism when they all have to pool the very air they breathe, like some pinko's daydream? You can't live off the land in space, guys, I'm pretty sure you yourselves are constantly telling us that.


• Finally, apparently, Whedon, during Firefly's over-prolonged existence, would apparently start off fan Q&As by saying, "If you ask me science questions I'll cry."
  
  That pretty much says it all, really.

On the Passing Scene

It occurs to me as I write this that the guy who does the "random thoughts" articles is Thomas Sowell. So hey, 'nother idea for a title for one. How helpful.

• A review of Avatar mentions that one problem with the movie is the graphics. Not that they're bad; precisely that they're good. And so you stop noticing they're graphics...and start noticing the story. Oops.


• So, the Incredibles. You know that thing about "Dash, everyone's special?" and he says, "Which means no-one is."?
  
  Exactly.
  
  I actually have a story I'm writing, a comic book world but from the point of view of the "supervillains", where the "superheroes" are all self-righteous tools. And one of the "villains" is basically Syndrome crossed with Doctor Doom and Lex Luthor—a perfectly normal human, except for her technological genius (she uses Iron Man-esque powered armor). And she says: what we call "civilization" is nothing more or less than rendering greatness a non-factor. You needed more ability to use a spear than to use a bow, and more to use a bow than to use a gun. You used to need the ability to memorize, but then writing came along—you used to need to practice to read poetry or prose attractively, now we just record a person doing it.
  
  Yeah, I really hate these paeans to unique genius and special-snowflakeness. You know what we do with special snowflakes where I come from?
  
  We put salt on 'em so they melt.


• Another of the Take Thats in my SF books is that there's a wackjob neo-Hermetic who wants to upload his mind to a computer. And whenever anyone hears about this, they say, "Didn't they erase a lot of people's brains trying that, a while back?" Yeah, and then he gets really mad, and says yes, thank you, he actually took the time to find out what a mind is and how it works. Not like those other transhumanists, who were idiots. He does admit to the continuity, though.
  
  Because let's face it, Transhumanists are basically a bunch of pre-millennial dispensationalists, like the Left Behind crowd, except they're socialist weenies and raving sex-perverts. Or possibly they're like the turn of the century Russian Cosmists, except with computers instead of rockets, and, you know, being fat lazy pervert Western socialists, instead of a bunch of Russian monks.
  
  Here's a hint: if you hold as an article of faith that science will discover the Second Law is wrong, you better never say another word about Christian fundamentalists. They, at least, know the supernatural when they're talking about it.


• I seem to be the only person who's noticed, but all those atheists who write books with evil churches in them? Yeah, they're actually vicious attacks on Islam. Why? Because not one of them, I'm not exaggerating one iota, has even the slightest hint of the concept of salvation as understood by Christians; none that I can think of even gets how the whole Jesus thing works. Indeed, there's only one atheist I can think of who actually seems to know what Christianity is, and he's too polite to write a book like that (though apparently Gabe once threw him out for something similar).
  
  On a related note, RE: Tycho's atheism, I actually think saying the entire Lord's Prayer, then saying "Psych" (which Tycho advised against doing around Gabe), would be kinda funny. Though I'd probably have to punch you if you did it in front of me.


• So where do people get this idea that biotech being a big deal is a new thing in SF? A Gift from Earth was published in 1968—man had not yet walked on the moon—and the Mt. Lookitthat colony has the mutant earthworms for mining, the mutant rats for housecleaning, the mutant grass for carpet, the mutant coral for building...the list goes on. To say nothing of the tailor-made viruses that form a part of the eponymous ramrobot cargo.


• Speaking of colonies, whenever I read American conservatives, I'm appalled at their quaint acceptation of the hagiographies the English liberals made up about history.
  
  But then it occurred to me: America is a Soviet space colony. What I mean is, imagine if the Soviets had managed to start up a colony before the Wall fell. Even if it had repudiated Communism (as the US Constitution actually repudiates whole swaths of Whiggism), it would likely still retain traditions like that the Tsar was a devil or Stalin saved the world from Hitler.
  
  But I (as a person of French and Irish descent), am like a Ukrainian inhabitant of such a colony. And sorry, but I'm not going to let you kacapi forget about the Holodomor.


• Speaking of the Holodomor (the Ukrainian famine), does anyone else think it's weird that we eat potatoes on St. Patrick's Day? I mean, the English made us eat potatoes because the wheat they forced us to grow was too good for us—and they forced us to abandon the Faith delivered to the Saints for the Hobby for the Younger Sons of Squires before they'd feed us, when the Blight caused the Famine. So isn't eating potatoes on St. Patrick's Day kinda like eating boot leather on St. Volodymyr's day?

The Word for World Is "Order"

...Because my ancestors had the arch, thank you. For the non-linguistically inclined, "mundus" and its derivatives mean "order"—though the word for "earth" in Latin (terra) means "thing that's not sea", rather than "dirt" like in the languages of Anglos and Germans. Yes it's a reference to a LeGuin story I haven't actually read, but that James Cameron plainly did (zing).

I was reading an interesting thing by John C. Wright about nonhuman characters in human fiction, and he said that aliens are either props or characters, and character-aliens are either art aliens, i.e. homunculi of various aspects of mankind, or else are science aliens—though of course most science aliens showcase aspects of humanity, and there're few art-aliens without a few nods to science.

It's a good point, but I'm afraid I must part company with him on the details of his analysis. Because, see, most of the attempts to make really alien characters, simply won't work. The Outsiders in Niven, for instance? Why would something that can photosynthesize be intelligent? You don't need brains to soak up sunlight, photons aren't noted for their cunning. Similarly the Pierson's Puppeteers: what's a herd-grazer need with intelligence? Grass, again, isn't smart, since it hunts photons; and the fact they live in herds explicitly means they're using mass of numbers, rather than intelligence, as a counter to predators. Finally, the Kzinti make little sense—in one of Niven's stories, a Puppeteer says the Kzinti have no use for abstract knowledge, and it's sort of implied that "monkey curiosity" is something Kzinti lack. But, um, Larry...did no editor take you aside, at this point, and remind you that the curiosity of cats is literally proverbial? Actually a society similar to that of territorial, mostly solitary predators like cats (or fossa) would probably look a lot like the kif from C. J. Cherryh: radical individuals, each waxing or waning in power relative to his fellows, combining only for gain, and with an elaborate system for establishing dominance. Niven writes space stuff, and arguably future histories, better than Cherryh, but her alien societies are better.

Actually it's doubtful whether anything not an apex predator would be smart, since anything not an apex predator would be too busy not getting eaten to develop civilization. Can there be an ecosystem dominated by its herbivores? I doubt it very much. Now of course "predators" includes omnivores like humans and bears as well as generalists like dogs and hypercarnivores like hyenas and cats, and you can find both solitary and gregarious predators in every group, so there's a lot to be done.

Now there's an interesting question as to whether non-gregarious animals would ever become sapient. On the one hand the group—I said before that humans are basically pack hunters—is an obvious advantage, plus a spur for development of language, but cats are solitary and have an incredibly elaborate system of social signaling, almost entirely devoted to "diplomacy" during inter-territorial encounters. It's not impossible for a species that lives like cats (and I don't mean lions) to develop language as a way to be very specific in their "please don't kill me for being near your territory" negotiations. Incidentally my felinoids are actually gregarious, not solitary—a bit more like hyenas than cats, except not matriarchal.

Brief digression, that's something I don't quite like about Cherryh's hani: they're too specifically lions, rather than more normal felids (probably to let her invert male-chauve tropes as she loves to do). See, normal felids are polygamists, like lions (most wild feline females only mate with one male), but instead of the females doing all the hunting for the group, they all hunt, since they don't see each other except to mate. Instead of each hani male becoming caretaker of his wives' land (which is sorta how the Navajo and Apache used to do it), his wives should be like independent landholders who all owe fealty (is that what they're calling it now?) to their husband, and his conjugal visits are also something like state visits. One of these days I'll have aliens like that.

Anyway, there aren't likely to be aliens with more than two sexes; the logistics would be a nightmare. Think how hard you, or any organism, finds getting a mate—now imagine you, and whatever mate you find, also have to find a third mate who's not only acceptable to both of you but who'll accept you, too. See the problem?

Aliens will likely have most of the same emotions as humans. Why? Emotions are cognitive time-savers, a sort of macros for your brain: half the program is pre-loaded the moment a situation starts, and you just have to execute the last few steps. So aliens will probably have fear, desire, lust, hunger, anger, and aesthetic appreciation (though aspects of that will probably be quite different). Actually hate, love, and probably approval and disapproval are intellectual or volitional, not emotions, but they, too, are probably universal (since angels and even God have them). That would incidentally be one difference between aliens-wholly-based-on-cats and Cherryh's kif: they'd have parental affection, which the kif don't seem to. Or the mothers would, anyway (if tigers are any indication, though, cat-chivalry would involve being kind to children a man encounters—and killing children to make their mothers receptive would be morally repugnant to an intelligent being, not that it stops humans).

As for culture, well, actually, there's not nearly as much variation in human cultures as people like to tell you. Anyone who tells you a concept can't be translated, for instance, is almost certainly lying to you, though it might take more than one word. Since we all have to cope with physical reality, and anything analogous to a rational animal would too (and it'd have to be an apex predator with at least some form of social interaction), its society would almost certainly function like a human one, though possibly in some particular combination we haven't often tried. They might have a form of recreation, economics, or social order that we don't, but probably not one we intrinsically can't.

Finally, it's probably unlikely there would be more than one intelligent species on a planet, although it occurs to me just now that my hypothetical based-directly-on-cats race, as distinct from the felinoids I'm actually writing books about, would be ideal for such a world. Basically they'd be the overlords, one (or one and her children) in a large territory, and then some other species, probably more generalist and gregarious, would be their underlings. Basically an aristocracy of cat-people with a populace of dogs or perhaps monkeys. That'd be pretty cool, huh?

Just One Thing

Damn them. Damn them to hell. If you make a movie and then call it Tree of Life, I expect damn Pak Protectors, not lame Magic Realism a la Benjamin Button (which also had Brad Pitt) with possible Freudian implications. I mean come on, that trailer started with that shot of space, like a nebula? Just to get my hopes up that I'd see Phssthpok's ramjet going through the gas, I swear. Bastards.

Yeah, it may've been silly to hope something like that, but it's not like they couldn't do it. Actually, though, I think we should get 'em to make a movie of "At the Core", though you'd have to change the title. Let's tell 'em it's about Global Warming (even though Global Cooling was the issue at the time, I forget which Known Space story mentions artificially restarting the Gulf Stream to counteract it).